The UK 's Pirate Party have raised concerns with how the City of London Police are acting with their "online database of websites 'verified' as being illegal with the aim of online advertisers using the database to restrict where their adverts will be displayed."
Exactly who verifies sites as being illegal and by which jurisdiction; how to work out if you are on this list, which will not be made public; and more importantly how to be removed from the list if inaccurately put on it is not yet clear. If the process is anything like the current censorship of pirate sites it will involve uncontested court rulings where the supposedly offending site isn't present to defend their legitimacy.
A pilot scheme saw only a 2% reduction in advertising from major household brands which makes it unclear how effective this initiative will be. However for any advertisers that utilise the list it will remove valuable and legitimate means for them to direct their desired customers towards their own legal products.
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Operation Creative, a project that has been in the works for a few months now between the City of London Police and the Movie and Music industries has just announced a new phase. The plan revealed yesterday by Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe during Adweek Europe will see the police reaching out directly to the users. The police will do that by advertising on the sites themselves. This is in the hope that the visitors to the websites will change their ways.
The police will need to find a way to advertise on sites without paying money, or the campaign itself will end up financing the very sites they aim to close. Furthermore, sites probably won't have much interest in running free ads, particularly those that aim to take their users away, so how long these 'rogue' ads will remain live is up for debate.
While a traditionally aggressive anti-piracy campaign could be on the cards, a more considered positive reinforcement of legitimate services may have more longevity. Where the ads will appear is not clear either as the Infringing Website List is being kept a secret, but FACT says that sites are being told of their inclusion in advance.
[Editors Note: Earlier this week we published a submission regarding the impartiality of the Infringing Website List (IFL)].
(Score: 3, Informative) by joshuajon on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:14PM
It's worth noting that The City of London [wikipedia.org] isn't the same as London [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:23PM
Could someone post a link to a copy of that list? I'm looking for a good time, and the officially police curated list would save me a lot of time.
It is kind of comical, just like how locally there was a minor push to not publicize where drug and prostitution busts happen in the crime blotter of the newspaper because people would flock to the area after the newspaper reported the "success" of a weeklong undercover arrest spree, knowing there's fun to be had and the undercover project is done.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:39PM
The City Of London police are not the same as the Metropolitan police. The former only cover a few square miles around the Bank of England, whereas the latter cover the rest of London. But the points made in TFS are still valid. An arbitrary list with no formal oversight - doesn't sound right to me.
(Score: 1) by tomtomtom on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:27PM
I'm not sure why the identity of the police force matters; this just sounds like a reason to bash the City Police (or the City of London) "because bankers" which is neither fair (if there were a corporate interest here it would be media companies not financials but those aren't based in the City on the whole) nor relevant; we constantly (and rightly) attack people using the bogus "because terrorists" type arguments, after all. If it were the Met Police, or Greater Manchester, or Cambridgeshire there would still be the same issue that it is not really a "local" matter (and arguably not even a national matter).
The real issue is I'm not sure at all why *any* police force is getting involved in this since it doesn't even appear to be a criminal matter on the surface of it. If anyone from government should be involved, it should be an entity like Trading Standards (although those are local too).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by skullz on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:02PM
Only a 2% reduction? Let's spend multi-millions on this for we are Government!
(Score: 2) by Boxzy on Wednesday April 02 2014, @03:21PM
I feel really conflicted about this, on the one hand Censorship is Evil and that makes me angry.
On the other hand, this concept relies on marketers not being rotten scumbags and that's just plain hilarious.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MrGuy on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:35PM
The real problem is reliability and transparency.
Impartiality is a concern is someone with something to gain deliberately rigs the system in their favor. This would be a concern if established companies could easily get their smaller competitors flagged as "Illegal." A non-impartial system can be exploited to benefit one party.
That COULD be an issue at some point, but per TFA that's not the real concern. The problem is RELIABILITY. The police don't have any particular reason to be "biased" in favor of one group over another. The problem is that it's easy for them to be SLOPPY. They may mean to ban the typo squatter on marksandspenser.com flagging cheap knockoffs while illegal using the real company's trademarks and layout, but accidentally ban the "real" site of marksandspencer.com in the database because they typed it "wrong" on accident. They may make mistaken assumptions about affiliations between sites based on limited information that may not be true. They might get the law wrong, and block sites that are technically legal but someone finds them distasteful.
Even though they may not be BIASED, we can't necessarily rely on the people making the "what's illegal" determination to be RIGHT.
This is compounded by a lack of transparency. Given that there's no visibility into "who's on the list?" companies may be flagged incorrectly and not even know. Even if they can prove they're on the list, there's no obvious recourse. Even if there were, there's not necessarily any feedback mechanism back to "who flagged this and why?" that we can learn from, so mistakes aren't constantly repeated
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:57PM
If it were any other police authority, I'd agree that impartiality wouldn't be an issue. However, this particular force is under the authority of the City Of London Corporation's Court of Common Council, made up of councilmen elected from wards in the City of London. This tiny area is effectively the financial district of London and the idea that this particular demographic of people is, however indirectly, effectively in control of a blacklist that can put a financial stranglehold on anyone they deem illegal is something I find quite scary. The people at the coal face compiling this list may not be biased, but the organisational structure above them has maintained various legal priviledges and exemptions from common law in the rest of the country and their legal definitions should not be applied nationally.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Boxzy on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:37AM
Of the end of democracy. Anarchists should be rejoicing right now, the end is nigh. /sarcasm
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